Night in Tunisia

Please, sir, may I stay?

First we should perhaps appologise to all our fabulous readers for not having been more consistent this past week. We have lots of reasons - Jodie visiting, the internet in Nasr on the fritz, a crisis at work, a personal work crisis, etc, etc. Anyhow, excuses are a lousey replacement for content. So I promise to redouble my efforts and get one message out there everyday, Monday to Friday!

Now how about today's blog.

Today was interesting. Loren and I collected all our documentation, our identification, our marriage certificate and our contracts. We booted it to the local shopping complex (one of only a few in Tunis), the Manar 6 Centre Commercial and found our way to a one hour photo booth, where we paid 5 Dinars each for 8 passport size photos (I don't like mine, just one tooth is poking out of my smile!) . It took an hour for the photos to develop so we managed to grab a coffee, and then it was away to the Ariana Distric Police Station to apply for our Cartes de Sejour (Residence Permits).

The police station is an old converted villa. It is enormous for a house, but pretty tiny for a police station. To get to the department of Foreign Services you have to follow the porch to the left and enter what I think was originally the kitchen or service entrance, go up a twisted staircase of marble slabs and into the tiny and cramped upper floor. The halls are too small, there is no place to sit, no place to fill out forms and a whole lot of noise. People come in and go out, greet each other in loud voices and holler down the hall for information instead of using the telephones.

I don't know how the officers can handle working there. They have no computers, chipped desks, broken filing cabinets, one telephone for three workers, and recipe cards for a filing system. Officers here are 1 for every 100 citizens. They get paid 250 Dinars per month. I get paid about double that, and I can't imagine how they live off what they make, when we couldn't make it with the double. Needless to say, our fellow was grumpy. It took about 15 minute of smiling at him and trying to make his job easier by being organized ourselves before he started using full sentances at us.

This is not the first time we have made an application. The first time we showed up with all the documentation that is listed in their laws. We were sent away because nothing was certified or registered. Funny how the laws don't mention that part. We also needed photographs, enda's list of statutes, their official recognition by the Government, and a pile of other stuff that has nothing to do with us.

We colected it all. I had this huge fat blue folder just stuffed with documents. Not only did we need original printouts and certified printouts, we needed photocopies of everything too. Once we arrived and they found all our documents in order we had to fill out some forms. Six of them. When we handed them in, the officer handed one back. He told us we needed to make a copy of that form. When asked he told us there was no way we could make a copy at the station. We then asked if we could just write out another form, to which he replied no. There was nothing for it. We packed up the entire dossier and blue file and stuffed it back into our bag and left the police station.

It took us all of about three minutes to find a shop that does copies. How handy that the shop was so close to the station. In fact the shop had just about everything you could need including a fax machine, a one hour photo developing operation, AC adaptors, Duracel batteries, and more. It was obviously equiped to deal with anything that the Police station couldn't. I wondered how multilingual the shop owner was too.

So with our coppies in hand we returned to the station where they reorganized the documents into piles, stapled them together, stapled our photos to them in strategic spots (though I couldn't for the life of me figure out what the logic behind them was), and told us to come back on Wednesday.

Well, I guess that's how it works in Tunisia. Sort of like the Wizard of Oz. "Come back later!"

I'll let you know if the'll keep us on Wendnesday.

posted by tiaraletourneau @ 4:48 p.m.